When your customers have access to instant help and accurate answers to their questions right on your website, you’re more likely to keep them happy.

And when they’re happy, customers buy more, and even become advocates for your brand. They also spend more time on your website–a vital factor for search engines and their algorithms.

Millennials and Gen-Z don’t like to call for support. Instead, they prefer to use a company’s website to get answers.

If you needed any further convincing, by 2020, 85 percent of all customer support will occur without human interaction!

But you need to let people know about your post-sale support. When you optimize your knowledge base and increase its usability, you improve user experience and are more likely to grow your audience.

Here are seven ways to optimise your knowledge base content to get more visitors and provide them with superior self-service support.

1. Optimize your knowledge base content for SEO

SEO is essential for your knowledge base website, just as it is for your website. There’s no better way of getting more visitors than writing and organizing your content to rank high in search results.

Canonical links–these help you to avoid duplicate content (when you target the same keywords for both your main website and knowledge base, for example).

Most knowledge base software has a wide series of features to help you benefit from technical SEO. Use them to make your content more appealing to search engines and your pages will be present in SERPs.

Also, be sure to optimise for all devices. Like your website, your knowledge base online portal should be accessible from any smartphone to reach broader audiences.

2. Optimize site speed

The numbers speak for themselves: 47 percent of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less–and 40 percent of them abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

Site speed is more than an SEO element. It’s crucial when you’re looking to provide your visitors with an optimal customer experience.

Even more than on your blog and website, the content in your knowledge base should be:

Accurate – most customers visit your knowledge base to get support, which means that they have a problem and no time to waste guessing how much of your information is updated.

Relevant – your posts should treat one topic at a time, based on your visitors’ need. Stick to the point and make sure your articles offer the guidance and information promised in the title.

Easy to scan – visitors read an average of 20 percent of a web page. They don’t have time to read more, so make sure you use titles and subtitles to show people where they can find the information they need.

Add visuals and videos to support the information in your articles. Screenshots, infographics, tutorials–anything that makes it easier for your visitors.

When you make information easy to follow and understand, your customers and prospects are more likely to share it on social media and recommend it to people with similar problems.

4. Curate the structure of your knowledge base

The structure is the foundation you need for a successful knowledge base. It’s like building a home. You can’t have a solid house without the right foundation.

Besides incredible knowledge base articles, visitors also need an easy way to navigate your website to get the information they’re looking for.

Information architecture allows you to organise your content better, to make navigation easier.

So set up the articles inside your knowledge base by topic or purpose. Posts that solve similar problems should stay in the same category, to help your users find them as fast as possible.

People who are looking to solve an emergency don’t have time to sift through tons of articles to find answers. They need solutions now.

Your knowledge base documentation should give them that. Otherwise, you’ll deliver a poor user experience, lose customers and miss out on business opportunities.

You can organise information by making it more visual–images, screenshots, white spaces, and specific titles. Everything should be customer-centric.

5. Make sure you have a killer search engine

Together with your information architecture, an effective Search engine can improve user experience and help you get more visitors.